There are a variety of systems that have been developed to deal with conditions where a network or communication channel to a network fail. For example, there are systems that failover to a Time Division Multiplexing (TDM) network when a packet switch network fails or vice versa. These solutions tend to be network centric and have been developed for larger customers where the costs for failover systems and the costs for full service failover networks are not as cost prohibitive. To implement these network centric solutions, customers have to purchase additional hardware such as gateways/controllers that provide alternate routing to a second network when there is a condition requiring failover. In addition, the costs for having the second full service network to failover tends to be expensive. For small to mid-size customers, having to pay the additional expense of new hardware is too cost prohibitive.
Other solutions have attempted to solve this problem by having a device such as a Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) device failover to a second network when a communication channel to the core network fails or has Quality of Service problems. To keep costs down, the second network typically has been a network that provides simple communication services, such as in some of the current peer-to-peer communication networks. These solutions eliminate the cost of having to buy additional hardware. However, customers want options that allow them to have the same capabilities that they currently have when access to their core network fails, without having to pay the excessive costs associated with additional hardware and expensive failover networks. What is needed is a cost effective failover solution that does not require network gateways/controllers and provides the same capabilities that customers currently get from their core network.